Did I mention at his funeral the son stood in front of everyone and told him how he wished he had had the chance to know his father better? I had taken him to lunch every Saturday morning for about a year and a half, we were buddies. One of the kindest things he ever said to me was he wished he had gotten to know me sooner and that I was his best friend.
Yet his own son, whose house he was living in, didn’t get a chance to know him better.
Needless to say, we avoid them at every opportunity.
Here it is culturally acceptable to ask for things you don’t really expect to get.
I am often approuched by strangers on the street with the request “give me your shoes”
Apparently that happens a lot in Canada too.
Four year olds get a free pass. 
A tenant who was being evicted asked for my apartment. Really. “Well, you don’t need all that space and it’s the only apartment I can afford and it’s your fault I’m being evicted.” Apparently I had the gall to let her landlord know she wasn’t paying her rent and should be evicted.
The same bitch called the police when the sheriff came to lock her out. The look on the cops face at seeing the sheriff and me (who he knew) was priceless.
For your sake, I hope she never catches you calling her a four year old :eek: . She is four and a half—and don’t your forget it. Yes, her mother and I plan to rein her in a bit once she hits kindergarten.
Heh, I read your post and seriously believed you were talking about an SO. I was thinking “that poor, poor guy”.
I suspected he was describing a parent-child relationship, but tripped on “god forbid I ask her to make me a meal once in a while,” and thought “nope, he’s doomed.”
Good one.
Okay, here’s my contribution. About ten years ago, just a few months after we had gotten divorced, my ex-husband called me from where he was stationed in Germany to ask me to have a third child with him. His rationale was that I had always wanted a third child (true) and that he wouldn’t let me have one because I had gained weight with the first two (also true) and the woman he had left me for couldn’t have children (true) and he wanted to give me this “gift” because he was truly sorry for how he had hurt me and deceived me for all those years (the hurt and deceived part is right, the truly sorry part…not so much). He swore he would support this third child and me forever, if I would just do this for him. I was, needless to say, stunned. I mean, not only was he not in the country, which meant he was asking for a booty call months in advance, but he was swearing to pay support for this child, when he was unable to pay support for our other two. And he expected me to help him cheat on his girlfriend. To get him off the phone, I told him I’d have to think about it.
I was truly stunned and then angry. He used the one thing he knew would get to me…my desire for another child…to try to get me to sleep with him again so he could assuage some of HIS guilt. Then about four days later, while visiting my mom, the next bombshell was dropped. As I walked through the door my mom tossed me the local paper, turned to the Vital Statistics page, and said, “So, he got married before he left the country?” There was the issuance of a marriage license for Scumball and the Slut. He never told me or the kids he had married her. He’d been calling me from Germany for weeks, begging me to take him back and then asking me to have a baby. This explained why he wasn’t able to stop by and see the kids the day before he left the country…he was off getting married!
The next time he called, I waited for him to say anything, and then I finally asked him…“Anything you’re forgetting to mention about what you did the day before you left?” and he finally admitted it. I told him he would have to tell the kids before he came home. He said he would, and then never called again. The day before he was scheduled to return I finally told them…that was the hardest thing I’d ever done. They hated The Slut, and had hoped during this stay in Germany he would dump her and meet someone else.
I’ve forgiven him a lot of things, but I’ll never forgive him trying to manipulate me by asking me to have another child with him when he was married to someone else.
You are not alone, Rigamarole. So did I.
I’m hugely relieved, but I feel stupid.
WOW! In my day I was a pretty smooth talker, but I never had chutzpah like that. My mother used to say, “Every little dog has their day.”. I think you can rest assured that his wiley ways will come back to haunt him, if they haven’t already.
Yep, I’ve raised one entitled brat and one decent human being. From the same kid:
“I need you to come out here and watch my kids over their Christmas holidays so I can have a break.”
Except, at the time, I was working at Sears as a commissioned sales associate. If you want time off at Christmas, you have to quit. And it’s also the best time of the year to MAKE MONEY! I told her no.
But the worst one I’ve ever had was from a store manager when I was an Operations Assistant: “Tell the Inventory Control Clerk she can take her Bereavement Leave after inventory. You know we only have six weeks to go!”
Her HUSBAND had died. I told him no, also. Creep.
Thank you! 
I remember in high school when my English teachers used to “request” that I translate school documents “in my spare time” - documents that THEY had been assigned by the administration. I could have charged 20 dollars per page in any other situation but of course they expected me to do them all for free. It’s hard to argue with a teacher who has the power to beat you with a big stick.
Not the most unreasonable, but…
I was grocery shopping the other day, and after loading my groceries into my car, I started to walk the cart to the cart return a few spaces over. I heard a whistle, looked in the general direction of it, and saw the cart boy, halfway across the parking lot, waving for me to bring my cart to him. Halfway across a rather large parking lot.
I did it, but I was still amazed that he thought it was perfectly acceptable to expect me to walk the cart all the way to him while he just stood there.
My roommate/landlord’s crazy financial antics have already ruined my credit, driven me about twice as far into debt as I was before I moved in, and forced me to move back in with my parents.
I got his long-stagnant computer up and running–in and of itself a hefty amount of work that any right-minded broke college kid would have charged him for, but I did it for free. I set up cable Internet access in my name after he agreed to pay half of the bill and the fee for the new cable modem, which would be his. He makes at least 1.5 times as much as I do at his job, has more hours, and he also turns a pretty penny from rental income and has tens of thousands of dollars in college savings that he never plans to spend; he could have easily paid for the whole shebang, but I needed Internet access badly as I had research papers due within days, so I agreed to those terms.
So I set up the account and try to hook everything up…only to find that there was not a single god damned cable jack, not one, in the entire two-bedroom apartment. BTW, it is illegal in California to rent out a property without a working cable jack. But since he cut me a deal on the rent, and I needed Internet access fast, I agreed to pay half of the $180 cost of knocking a hole in the wall and installing the cable. I then introduced him to the Internet and showed him how to watch music videos and download music and movies, set an email account up for him and introduced him to chatrooms–more than he would’ve learned at a $90 community college course. I knew he had a thing for lesbian porn so I promised to teach him how to find it online safely, and warned him not to try it in the meantime because he’d mess up the computer.
Sure enough, it took him less than a day to royally fuck the computer up with porn from the wrong websites. I sighed and grumbled and then proceeded to do hundreds of dollars’ worth of software recovery, spyware and adware removal and general computer work for free so I could use his computer for research. (Mine was broken.) And once I got it working again I let him use my headphones to listen to his shitty-ass music–which he blasted so loud I could hear it loud and clear from across the apartment AND HE WAS WEARING MY HEADPHONES. Every single day I had to stop what I was doing several times to remind him to turn the volume down. I mean, it sounded like it was on speakers.
I finally got him to stop raping my headphones and my eardrums with his god-awful Eminem and 90s metal, and then he up and decides that the Internet is free and stops paying for it.
He still owes me $90–a generous figure that doesn’t take into account the free computer work, the computer lessons or the illegal cable-jack charge–and while he blows entire paychecks on Jack in the Box and weed he wants me to get the Internet access reinstated and he bitches and whines about how I “got him hooked” on the Internet and then took it away from him. This, while I’m living on scraps to pay off a couple of traffic tickets and get my license reinstated while all of my other debt (much of which he caused) grows interest. Not bloody likely.
Other runner-ups include the “friend” who called me out of the blue one day to ask if I could rent a truck for her in my name for the day to move her motorcycles from one house to another or something–this when I was an 19-year-old college sophomore with no money and virtually no credit. She was a bank teller, at least 10 years older than me and married to a guy without a job who mysteriously showered her in piles of cash regularly (probably from selling weed). She later hooked me up with her hot friend who put on a show of falling in love with me–only to reveal a couple of months after we started dating that she was an illegal immigrant with two kids born out of wedlock and she needed a green card. I actually agreed to marry her (yeah, I was a doormat), but came to my senses and dumped her before we made any serious plans. Then my “friend” called me one night weeping and sobbing about how the girl she’d hooked me up with was getting deported–they even came up with a crazy story about a federal raid on the jewelry store she owned, that didn’t hold up to 30 minutes’ scrutiny. Then I found out that my ex spoke perfect English (she made me learn conversational Spanish for her) and had in fact been flirting with my other “friend”–who was regularly tagging the first “friend”–in English for the duration of our relationship.
Then the other ridiculous request runner-up: That guy called me up one night after I’d dumped the girl and asked me for her number because his friend was over, they were drunk and they were “getting lonely”. I knew full well that he already had her number (which was legit in and of itself since he’d had to pick her up from her work once), so I said, “No, that’s not cool” and immediately hung up and called the ex. Fifteen minutes into that conversation, she excused herself to take another call. When she came back, I told him about my “friend”'s request and she acknowledged that it was him, asking her to drive across town to perform sexual favors on him and his buddy. She overtly agreed with me that it was a shitty thing for him to do, but AFAIK as soon as our conversation was over she went down there and sucked them dry. Looking back on all the mistrust of that relationship, I wouldn’t be incredibly surprised.
That reminds me of the other unusual request–a girl I’d just met in an International Shipping class asked me to marry her when we started talking at the class break. Apparently she was Brazilian and needed American citizenship so she could move up the ranks at the shipping company where she worked. At least she was honest about it–I gotta give her that. And hell, I might’ve even agreed to it at a different stage in my life, but I was in the processing-papers stage of joining the military, and throwing in an illegal alien dependent would have probably complicated things a little. Actually, looking back on it, I really should’ve done it–at least then I wouldn’t have been able to join the military!
K’s been my friend since we were children, but she manages to amaze me sometimes with her unreasonable requests.
This happened about five years ago and I’m sure I’ve told the story before. K, husband and baby showed up at our house one weekend to find the place in turmoil. We were attempting to strip, sand, paint and reassemble our bedroom in a single weekend, and we were running around like mad people in order to get everything done. Our bed was in the loungeroom, our furniture was pushed all over the place, there were paint tins and drop sheets and brushes and stuff everywhere. She sits down and makes me a fabulous offer - since she and her husband are going out to dinner that night with his parents, she thought she’d let us babysit so we could get in some practice for when we had kids of our own! She added that she thought she and her hubby deserved a nice, relaxing and quiet meal by themselves for a change so she’d decided to offer to let us look after her baby. I’m standing there before her, covered in paint, my home a shambles and she’s not just asking me to babysit at the last minute - she’s pitching it as doing me a favour?! I declined.
K & I went to school with J. I was friends with both girls, but they were never close to each other - more acquaintances who just happened to hang out with the same people. Anyway, recently I was invited to J’s wedding but K wasn’t - not unreasonable, as K & J have hardly seen each other in years. I knew she’d probably take it hard so I tried to break it gently to her, rather than have her find out by other means. I mentioned in passing that J was getting married “this month” and let that sink in, and then about four days before I mentioned that I wouldn’t be available Saturday because I was going to J’s wedding. She seemed to take it really well and I felt relieved. The next day, she IMs me to ask “Hey, can I come to J’s wedding with you as your date?”. There was no way on earth I wanted to call the bride-to-be and say “Hey, you know how you didn’t invite K to your wedding even though you were perfectly capable of doing so if you wanted her there? Yeah, well, can I bring her as my date even though I wasn’t invited to bring a date and even though it’s only three days until the wedding so you’ve got all your place settings and catering organised already?”. I was staggered that K even suggested it. I was even more surprised to learn later that the following day she’d bumped into the matron of honour and fished for an invitation from her.
K’s own wedding was held on a Friday, and at extremely short notice. She blithely informed me that she didn’t think it was too much to ask that people take that one day off work because it was such a special occasion - she just has no concept of how difficult it is for some. I honestly didn’t think my then-partner was going to be able to do it… it was hard enough for him to get days off for things he wanted to do.
It’s hard to hold against her… you know she takes for granted that people will drop everything for her because she’s the kind of person who’d drop everything for her friends. It’s still frustrating though.
This doesn’t hold a candle to many of the stories here - I guess I am a really lucky person in that respect! Still, it’s kind of amusing.
I was working full time as a lawyer at the time this happened. A friend was planning a birthday party for her husband,* and she was really uptight about all the details. She had several health problems, didn’t work, and was basically a shut-in, so I tried to help her out. I didn’t say what I really thought when she showed off the colorful plastic pitcher and cups she’d bought for the party - and told me she planned on returning them to the store afterward. I should have taken it as a warning.
Anyway, she was stressing over the cake. I completely understood that she didn’t want a grocery-store cake, but I guess she couldn’t do it herself or afford a nice bakery, and in the end I responded to some hints by offering to bake a cake for the party. Her response? “Great, thanks! Can you bake a sample cake so I can try it before the party?” Yes, she wanted to test my free, volunteered cake to make sure it was good enough, by having me bake not one but two cakes in the course of about a week, IIRC. I think I was just too flabbergasted to react coherently, and said OK.
At my next opportunity (and with my job, it was not an insignifcant effort), I went to the grocery store and bought something like four pounds of unsalted butter, and all the other ingredients needed to make two cakes. The next day, she called and told me she changed her mind, and was getting a Baskin-Robbins cake! She’s just lucky she caught me before I baked the test cake - I think I would have strangled her.
Of course, on the day of the party, we were asked to come a bit early to help out a little. You know, we figured we’d help set out decorations, some final prep work on the food, that kind of thing. Well, in addition to being asked to chop vegetables in a kitchen where every single square inch of countertop was covered with junk, I was requested to iron the hostess’s outfit for the party. Finally I came to my senses and begged off. Meanwhile, my husband, who happened to be suffering his first migraine (and therefore didn’t realize what was going on enough to say, “No, I have a migraine”), was drafted to clean the pool before the other guests arrived.
When the guests did arrive, our hosts didn’t introduce anyone (only two couples had ever met each other before), and we stood around rather awkwardly, until it started to rain, putting a further damper on the pool party/BBQ. We hung in for several hours, then said we had to go, because we’d planned on seeing a movie that night. They were offended we didn’t stay longer.
*Not that we knew it was her husband - they got married secretly, IIRC, because they wanted to have a huge ceremony later when her health improved and they had more money.
Second story - my husband’s, really:
When my now-husband and I were living together, after college, we got a call from his parents. It turned out they were getting divorced. Over time, it came out that his dad had been cheating on his mom with a woman at work, who was also married. Within, oh, a year or so of the final divorce, we were invited to his dad’s wedding to his co-adulterer. My husband had decided he wanted to maintain a relationship with his dad, so we went.
Five minutes before the ceremony, my husband, his sister, and the bride’s two minor children were informed they would be part of the ceremony. As you can imagine, none of the kids was too keen, and it was clear the timing was meant to put them on the spot and prevent them saying no. My husband was pushed into being his father’s best man, but I really felt for the woman’s kids. It was hard enough for my grown, living-on-his-own man to deal with. How’d you like to be ten and manipulated into being in the wedding of your mom to the guy she was schtupping at work, which broke up your family?
Don’t sell yourself short; those were both pretty bad! :mad: :eek:
After my friend’s wedding reception, the mother of the bride told me that as a bridesmaid, one of my duties was to help clean up the small hall in the basement of the church where it was held. Food, drink, tables and chairs. Mother couldn’t stay to clean up herself, as she had to hurry home to the private family party she was hosting for the bride and groom. I was not invited to that party. At this time, I had an upper respiratory infection which I couldn’t take off either of my 2 jobs to get over, as I had to save up to go across the state in a rental car to said wedding. (I showed up at the rehearsal to find 2 things I hadn’t been told - the rehearsal was semi-formal [I had to go buy another dress immediately] and the bridal shower had been held that morning, without me.)
I left the other 7 suckers in the party to clean and put away; I changed out of my dress and into a hockey jersey, drove a few hours away and watched my home team win a Stanley Cup. I remind myself that weddings make people crazy and their behavior shouldn’t be held against them later, unless it continues.
After my friend’s wedding reception, the mother of the bride told me that as a bridesmaid, one of my duties was to help clean up the small hall in the basement of the church where it was held. Food, drink, tables and chairs. Mother couldn’t stay to clean up herself, as she had to hurry home to the private family party she was hosting for the bride and groom. I was not invited to that party. At this time, I had an upper respiratory infection which I couldn’t take off either of my 2 jobs to get over, as I had to save up to go across the state in a rental car to said wedding. (I showed up at the rehearsal to find 2 things I hadn’t been told - the rehearsal was semi-formal [I had to go buy another dress immediately] and the bridal shower had been held that morning, without me.)
I left the other 7 suckers in the party to clean and put away; I changed out of my dress and into a hockey jersey, drove a few hours away and watched my home team win a Stanley Cup. I remind myself that weddings make people crazy and their behavior shouldn’t be held against them later, unless it continues.